Scents

are back after years of stinks

and nothing. I went all day unwashed

with you on me.

Only tonight, when I heard the squeak

of shower valves and simple

pour and splash in the tub, did I sense

I smell again without intention,

I nose my way

to the stairs, up and down, into

our house and out to the world, some

new something I didn't know I'd missed.

I think it started three days ago,

when I stepped inside the school cafeteria

and smelled baked potatoes, whole and spiceless.

Thinking only of coffee, I was surprised

to be so shrouded in bake and potato,

especially when I saw them lying by sixes

in the steam-table pan, wrapped in tin

foil, the way I hate baked potatoes.

Tonight, walking the dogs, when I crossed

Bellemeade just after a car pulled through

at the four-way stop, I smelled the H₂S and

remembered catalytic converters and chemistry

lab and rotten eggs.

My two dogs pulled me through.

The sky still weighed leftover

thundershowers, fog resisting

a late evening rise, asphalt lifting

that tarry scent among pines and pine chips,

mulch, and other dogs' leavings that mine

stopped to sniff.

I would not claim

unusual discrimination, finely driven

olefactions. No, the scent of you rose

from my jeans, now fourteen hours later.

I wanted to be clean,

not of those smells, but rather,

to comprehend rinsing, clarifying

(as with butter drawn and silvered),

shelving of what happened today,

what has happened

for these few past years, when scents lay

waiting, stinks and nothing held my hand,

blindered me, nosed me toward you

again, the scent, the tense, the sentences,

the unmoving times of my life.

--Robert W. Hill

Cold Mountain Review 31.1 (Fall 2002): 11-12